Wood is a common material used in residential, commercial, and industrial constructions as structural panels, cabinets, and door components as well as other functions. Even today, after the development of several new types of composite materials, wood remains one of the most widely-used structural materials because of its excellent strength and stiffness, pleasing aesthetics, good insulation properties and easy workability.
However, in recent years the cost of solid timber wood has increased dramatically as its supply shrinks due to the gradual depletion of old-growth and virgin forests. It is particularly expensive to manufacture doors from such material because typically less than half of the harvested logs is converted to solid sawn lumber, the remainder being discarded as scrap.
Accordingly, because of both the cost of high-grade solid wood as well as a heightened emphasis on conserving natural resources, wood-based alternatives to natural solid wood lumber have been developed that make more efficient use of harvested wood and reduce the amount of wood discarded as scrap. Plywood, particle board and oriented strand board (“OSB”) are examples of wood-based composite alternatives to natural solid wood lumber that have replaced natural solid wood lumber in many structural applications in the last seventy-five years.
While these wood-based composites use wood more efficiently, they have the disadvantage of not always being able to make full use of the available wood supply in the wood baskets adjacent to wood composite manufacturing plants. For example, when the wood supply includes material from multiple wood species, attempts to use the multiple wood species can cause problems, particularly an undesirable variation in product properties such as stiffness and strength, due to the inherent characteristics of the wood species. For instance, if two or more species are used that have different characteristics in their anatomical, physical, and mechanical attributes, it will add difficulties in the manufacturing process and in the end it will possibly undermine the quality of the product.
Given the foregoing, there is a need in the art for wood composite materials made from wood species that are commonly available in known wood baskets which may be blended together to form wood composite materials having performance characteristics suitable for a wide range of uses.